Volume 3, Part 5. The Townsend Crisis, 1766-1770
Volume 3, Chapter 35. The Mutiny Act Though the Stamp Act crisis was over,
an important irritant in Anglo-American relations remained. During 1765, Grenville had passed the
Mutiny Act, which gave the British Army the right to quarter its troops in private American dwellings.
Originally, the troops were to be quartered in private homes, but the final bill, which
Benjamin Franklin helped to draw up, limited houses open to seizure, to inns, unoccupied
buildings and barns. The act also forced the colonial governments to furnish the soldiers
with specified supplies. At the time, Franklin proudly proclaimed for the amended bill. Two
Two years later, however, amidst colonial resistance to the measure, he had a convenient
lapse of memory about his role in the affair.
The object of the Mutiny Act was to conscript the houses of the colonists so as to allow
large bodies of British troops to be stationed in the seaports, since any possible enemies
of the colonists were on the frontiers.
The purpose of quartering troops in the seaports could only be to intimidate and coerce the
colonist.
For this service, the colonists would be forced to yield their dwellings to the Redcoats.
During the Stamp Act crisis, the Mutiny Act was forgotten and went unenforced, but after
repeal of the Stamp Tax, problems under the Act came to the fore.
Aside from the threat inherent in quartering the British troops, many colonists realized
that the coercing of supplies was a tax in kind, every bit as bad in principle as any
tax levied in money. Was this new tax in kind to perform the work of the hated stamp tax?
To compel the Americans to pay for British troops amongst them?
The earliest and most important resistance took place in New York, the headquarters for
the British Army and its commander-in-chief, General Thomas Gage. New York refused to obey
Gage's request for supplies under the Mutiny Act, and insisted on complying only partially
with royal requisitions while demanding that England recompense the colony. Other colonies
hedged on following suit. Most did not comply fully, but did not challenge the laws openly,
and voted some supplies. Understandably, there was, so soon after the vigorous resistance
to the Stamp Act, a general desire for respite. Notwithstanding, when the Massachusetts Council
voted supplies and quarters to a British artillery troop, its action was met by a storm of denunciation
from James Otis and the Assembly, and Sam Adams asked whether the Mutiny Act is not
taxing the colonies as effectively as the Stamp Act. Otis called for a purge of the
Council, and the Assembly refused to vote supplies, but in the end, it voted for partial
compliance. Partial noncompliance also occurred in New Jersey. There, the Assembly denounced
The Mutiny Act is being as much an act for laying taxes on the inhabitants as the Stamp Act, but then voted funds.
However, it officially evaded full compliance by vaguely instructing a new set of commissioners to act according to the custom of the province.
South Carolina partially complied but refused to include such specified supplies as salt and beer in its requisition.
Apart from New York, the most principled resistance occurred in, and unlikely, because generally
the least revolutionary colony, Georgia.
Georgia demurred on even partial compliance until its 1767-68 session, when it followed
the course of its neighboring sister colony, South Carolina.
To the new Tory administration in England, this partial defiance of the Mutiny Act was
a red flag to the English bull. Now English troops as well as Parliament were being defied.
The new Prime Minister, a supposed friend of American liberty, William Pitt, now the
Earl of Chatham, lost no time in displaying his true feelings toward the colonies. Bolstering
During Pitt's anger towards Americans was a petition of 240 New York merchants in late
1766 asking for free trade and for the virtual removal of the restrictive trade and navigation
laws.
Arch-mercantilist and imperialist that he was, Pitt responded by inducing parliament in the
restraining act of June 1767 to suspend the New York assembly completely until it was
William Pitt had scarcely assumed the ministry, however, when his chronically intermittent
Insanity took hold, and he lost de facto control over the course of the English government.
Stepping into virtual power was a flashy playboy opportunist and unstable epileptic, the renegade
Whig Charles Champagne Charlie Townsend, Chancellor of the Exchequer, in the pit cabinet.
This embodiment of opportunism, who had opposed repeal of the Stamp Act, soon decided upon
a tough, imperialist line toward the colonies. Part of this line was the crackdown on the
New York Assembly. Here Townsend pursued a far shrewder course, for example, than Bedford,
who wanted to send a military force to crush the resistant colonies. Townsend saw that
New York, as the most important and most defiant colony on the mutiny issue, was the obvious
focal point.
In making his move, Townsend decided on suspension of the assembly rather than outright military
action. He was backed by Pitt, Grafton, Camden and Shelburne. In the cabinet, only the redoubtable
liberal General Conway opposed the measure as coercion of the Americans. The potential
crisis over New York was eased when, at the same time that Britain was cracking down,
The assembly itself was deciding to surrender. Over the opposition of the radicals, and by
only a single vote, the assembly decided to comply fully with the Mutiny Act. Parliament's
order for suspension never had to be enforced. New York capitulated easily, and with it the
bulk of American resistance to the Mutiny Act. One reason for New York's flagging courage
was the failure of two of its neighboring colonies, Connecticut and Pennsylvania, to give it any
support. Connecticut, indeed, quartered the troops that New York had refused to supply.